National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was born not from ambition, but from a budget rider that slipped through Congress almost unnoticed. On the 3rd of March 1915, the last day of the 63rd Congress, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Naval Appropriations Bill into law. Buried inside it was a provision creating a committee of 12 unpaid people tasked with solving the problems of flight. Their annual budget was $5,000. From that modest beginning, NACA would go on to shape the outcome of World War II, break the sound barrier, and lay the foundations for the agency that would put humans on the moon. How did a small advisory committee with almost no money become the engine behind American air supremacy? And why, after 43 years, did it quietly cease to exist on the 1st of October 1958?

• 2. A Rider on an Appropriations Bill

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  Charles D. Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 to 1927, was the man most responsible for bringing NACA into existence. An earlier attempt had already failed: in December 1912, President William Howard Taft had appointed a National Aerodynamical Laboratory Commission chaired by Robert S. Woodward, but when legislation came to a vote in early 1913, it was defeated.

  Walcott chose a different approach. Rather than seeking a standalone bill, he suggested attaching the proposal as a rider to the Naval Appropriations Bill. In January 1915, Senator Benjamin R. Tillman and Representative Ernest W. Roberts introduced identical resolutions along the lines Walcott had outlined. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote that he heartily endorsed the principle on which the legislation was based.

  NACA was modeled on agencies already operating in Europe, including the British Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (which had the most influence), the French L'Etablissement Central de l'Aérostation Militaire in Meudon, the German Aerodynamic Laboratory of the University of Gottingen, and the Russian Aerodynamic Institute of Koutchino. The committee's stated purpose was to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight with a view to their practical solution. On the 29th of January 1920, President Wilson appointed Orville Wright, the pioneering flier and aviation engineer, to NACA's board, lending it a measure of living history that no other federal agency could claim.

• 3. Building the Research Machine

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  When NACA had 100 employees in 1922, it was already pursuing a more ambitious mission than its founding legislation had imagined: promoting military and civilian aviation through applied research that looked beyond current needs. By 1938, the staff had grown to 426. To pursue that mission, the agency built an impressive collection of wind tunnels, engine test stands, and flight test facilities at sites including Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia; Ames Aeronautical Laboratory at Moffett Field; the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory; and Muroc Flight Test Unit at what would later become Edwards Air Force Base.

  NACA's first wind tunnel was formally dedicated at Langley on the 11th of June 1920. It was not the most advanced machine in the world, but it gave engineers and scientists a place to develop concepts that would influence wind tunnel design for decades. By the early 1930s the agency had built a full-scale 30 by 60 foot tunnel, and by late 1942 a 16-foot tunnel at Moffett had reached Mach 0.75, or 570 mph.

  Beyond formal assignments, staff were encouraged to pursue unauthorized "bootleg" research, provided it was not too exotic. That policy produced a long string of breakthroughs: thin airfoil theory in the 1920s, the NACA engine cowl in the 1930s, the NACA airfoil series in the 1940s, and the area rule for supersonic aircraft in the 1950s. Commercial and military clients could also use NACA facilities on a contract basis, making the agency a shared national resource rather than a closed government shop.

• 4. Superchargers and the Mustang

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  Before the United States entered World War II, engineers at a major engine manufacturer were struggling to produce superchargers capable of keeping the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress powerful at high altitude. A team from NACA solved the problems and created the standards and testing methods used to produce effective superchargers going forward. The result was that U.S.-produced aircraft had a significant power advantage above 15,000 feet, a margin that Axis forces never fully countered.

  The designs and information from the B-17 work spread through nearly every major American military powerplant of the war. Almost every aircraft used some form of forced induction that drew on information NACA had developed. Wartime writers described the agency as "The Force Behind Our Air Supremacy."

  The second major wartime contribution came through a request the British government sent to North American Aviation. The P-40 Tomahawk fighters on offer were considered too outdated to serve on the European front, so North American began developing a new fighter. The British chose a NACA-developed airfoil for the design. That airfoil gave the new aircraft dramatically better performance than previous models. The aircraft became the P-51 Mustang, and the laminar wing profile NACA supplied was central to what made it fly.

• 5. Breaking the Sound Barrier

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  John Stack, the head of NACA's compressibility division, understood a problem that had been building for years. As aircraft approached Mach 1, they encountered compressibility, a phenomenon where both subsonic and supersonic airflow exist simultaneously over the wings, generating a range of dangerous and undesirable characteristics. Wind tunnel data was proving unreliable because the tunnels suffered from the same aerodynamic problems. Stack, along with Ezra Kotchner of the Army Air Forces and Walter Diehl of the Navy, concluded that a specialized research aircraft was the only way to gather clean supersonic data.

  On the 16th of March 1945, the Army Air Technical Service Command awarded Bell Aircraft a contract to develop three transonic and supersonic research aircraft under the designation MX-653. The bulk of the research came from NACA's Compressibility Research Division, which had already been operating for more than a year when Bell began conceptual designs. Stack's division also had years of prior data from his earlier role heading the high-speed wind tunnel division, which itself had nearly a decade of high-speed test data.

  Although the Bell X-1 was commissioned by the Air Force and flown by Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager when it exceeded Mach 1, NACA was officially in charge of the testing and development program. NACA ran the experiments and collected the data. In recognition of that contribution, Stack was personally awarded the Collier Trophy alongside the owner of Bell Aircraft and Yeager himself.

• 6. The Area Rule

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  In 1951, NACA engineer Richard Whitcomb worked out the area rule, a principle that explained how to shape an aircraft's cross-section to reduce drag as it approached and passed through transonic speeds. The Convair F-102 became the first aircraft to test what happened without it. Designed as a supersonic interceptor, the F-102 was unable to exceed the speed of sound despite the best efforts of Convair's engineers. The problem was discovered after the aircraft had already entered production.

  NACA engineers were sent in to solve the problem on the factory floor. The production line had to be modified to rebuild F-102s already in progress so they could incorporate the area rule. The altered aircraft, known as "area ruled" aircraft, could exceed Mach 1, but only by a small margin, because the rest of the Convair design had not been built with the area rule in mind from the start.

  The F11F Tiger showed what the principle could achieve when applied from the beginning of the design process: it broke the sound barrier without even needing afterburner. Because the area rule had been classified, it took several years before Whitcomb received recognition. In 1955 he was awarded the Collier Trophy for his work on both aircraft. The most consequential application of the area rule was the B-58 Hustler, already in development at the time, which was redesigned to incorporate it. That redesign produced the first American supersonic bomber, capable of Mach 2 at a moment when Soviet fighters had only just reached that speed themselves.

• 7. Becoming NASA

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  On the 21st of November 1957, NACA director Hugh Dryden established the Special Committee on Space Technology, also known as the Stever Committee after its chairman, Guyford Stever of MIT. The committee's mandate was to coordinate federal agencies, private companies, and universities toward a coherent American space program. The trigger was urgent: Wernher von Braun, technical director at the Army's Ballistic Missile Agency, had a Jupiter C rocket ready to launch a satellite in 1956, only to have it delayed, and the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 in October 1957.

  On the 14th of January 1958, Dryden published "A National Research Program for Space Technology." The document argued that the challenge of Sputnik had to be met with an energetic program of research and development, and proposed that a national civilian agency, working in close cooperation with the military, lead that effort, following the pattern NACA and the military services had already established.

  On the 5th of March 1958, James Killian, chair of the President's Science Advisory Committee, sent a memorandum to President Dwight D. Eisenhower titled "Organization for Civil Space Programs." Killian described NACA as a "going Federal research agency" with 7,500 employees and $300 million worth of facilities, one that could expand its program with a minimum of delay. He recommended that NASA be built on a "strengthened and redesignated" NACA. On the 1st of October 1958, NACA was dissolved and its assets and personnel were transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Stever Committee's membership included Robert R. Gilruth of NACA Langley, Abe Silverstein of NACA Lewis, and Wernher von Braun, whose Jupiter C had been waiting in the wings since 1956.